


Starting Over

by VampireBadger



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Everyone gets stuck on Earth, Gen, No shipping, Time Travel, in the past, just lots of lovely bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-05 13:50:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15172070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampireBadger/pseuds/VampireBadger
Summary: Post Season 6, the paladins find themselves thrown back in time, back to their earliest days at the Garrison. Getting back to space turns out to be more complicated than it should be, and this time around it turns out that Earth might really need some defenders...





	1. Chapter 1

It's not as easy as it sounds, going back to Earth. It's not just declaring they're going to do it, they have to actually sit down and come up with a plan.

In a way, they're at the lowest point they've ever been. Shiro is alive but in _bad_ shape, the Castle is gone, and without the teludav to help them, travel is going to be slow. They spend a long time, hours, right where they'd ended up after setting the castle to explode, just trying to coordinate between everyone and figure out what their first step is going to be (and then the one after that, and the one after _that_ ).

And it's _staying_ that turns out to be the mistake.

"Hey guys," Pidge says after a while, and the words are so sudden and urgent that everyone else stops talking.

"Don't tell me," Hulk says, and its obvious to all of them that behind his attempt at being cheerful, he's bracing himself. "More bad news?"

"There's a lot of weird radiation in the area," Pidge says. "It's been building ever since the Castle was destroyed, but it's just started spiking, and—honestly I think we'd better get out of this area. Now."

The words aren't even out of her mouth before they're all scrambling to move. They're all just so _used_ to bad things happening by now that they don't even question that the day apparently has one more awful twist in store for them.

But they haven’t moved very far at all before there's a flash of too bright light, just behind them, growing quickly to envelop the group, and then _something is changed, something HAS CHANGED—_

And then everything starts all over again.

-//-

Lance wakes, slowly. He's vaguely aware of being sprawled out on something uncomfortable, of someone nearby droning on nearby, something boring that he doesn't care about, blah blah blah…

Honestly it's sort of nice just to be able to sleep for a minute, after all the running and fighting.

Something sharp jabs into Lance's side, so painfully that he ~~jerks upright and shrieks~~ _wakes up in a cool and controlled manner_ , almost falling out of his chair in the process. And then he freezes, looking around at a scene that's completely impossible because… because this has already happened. He _remembers_ this.

He's back at the garrison, on his very first day. The new cadets had been required to attend a kind of orientation, where two or three of the officers took turns droning on and on about… something? Honestly, Lance hadn't even been listening the first time, he'd fallen asleep, and Hunk had elbowed him in the side to wake him up, to keep him from getting in trouble.

Hunk. Lance's eyes dart sideways, and sure enough there he is, looking younger than Lance has seen him in ages, looking actually exactly the same as he had on the first day they met. Lance opens his mouth to start demanding questions as loudly as he can, but Hunk shakes his head frantically.

" _What_ —"

Half the other cadets in the room turn around to look at him, probably hoping he'll be more interesting than the lecturer at the front of the room.

Hunk leans over and slaps his hand over Lance's mouth, cutting him off after just that one word. For a second, all Lance can think is _how is he so calm about this?_ He feels like there's a giant twitch running all the way through his body—he needs to know how and why they're here, he needs to know how they get back to Voltron because _oh God_ , if they're back on Earth, if this really is the past, where are the lions?

Then he realizes that Hunk's hand over his mouth is shaking slightly, and his face is like a mask, his expression isn't changing at all like he's force himself to keep whatever he's thinking inside. Somehow, knowing he's not the only one panicking about this makes Lance feel very slightly better. He nods at Hunk, who nods back and slowly lowers his hand.

 _(He remembers this—he_ remembers _this, the falling asleep during orientation, being prodded awake by Hunk, only of course he hadn't been Hunk then, he'd just been the annoying kid in the seat next to him that kept interrupting his nap)_

"Hunk," he hisses. "Hunk, what is—"

"Shh!"

"What is _happening?_ "

"Shh, Lance!"

People are turning around to look at them, and Lance, reluctantly, shushes. But a few ticks after he sinks down in his seat, arms crossed, tapping his foot impatiently as he waits for the orientation speeches to be over, Hunk shoves a piece of paper into Lance's hand.

"What's thi—"

" _Shh!_ "

Lance rolls his eyes a little, but unfolds the piece of paper and hunches over it to read Hunk's chicken scratch handwriting.

_So it's definitely weird that we're back here, right? I'm not the only one that remembers that this happened already, right? This isn't some crazy dream?_

Lance starts to write back, then remembers he doesn't have anything to write _with_. "Hunk," he whispers. "Hey, Hunk can I—"

Hunk jabs him in the side with a pencil.

Lance grins as he takes it and writes back.

_No way man, I definitely remember all that happening. You don't just dream up something like Voltron, you know?_

Another quick scuffle as Lance passes first the paper, then the pencil over to Hunk, and then Hunk writes and passes them both to him again. Lance looks down at what Hunk wrote, and droops.

_Then why are we HERE?_

And the answer, of course, is that he has no idea. He scribbles something about talking after the lectures are over, because there's already about three rows of people staring at them, and there's probably going to be plenty to talk about if they want to figure this out.

So Lance spends another few minutes thinking everything over, trying to figure it out and coming up short. Something to do with that radiation Pidge had found? But radiation doesn't have anything to do with time travel, does it? Lance has no idea, he's never been an engineering kind of guy, but maybe it does? And Lotor had been zipping in and out of the quintessence field and maybe blowing up the castle hadn't been _quite_ enough

And then his gaze, which has been drifting back and forth across the lecture hall just out of boredom more than anything else, lands on one of the cadets sitting down near the front. It's Keith, sitting ramrod straight, spine like a ruler as he stares straight in front of him. "Should we tell him we remember too?" Lance whispers to Hunk.

"What?" Hunk whispers back. " _Now_? Lance, we just decided to wait until after orientation is over."

"No, no, no," Lance says. "It'll be fine, look." He leans over to grab Hunk's notebook, the one they've been using to pass notes back and forth. Then he tears out the first blank page he finds, balls it up, and chucks it at Keith's head.

It misses.

Lance makes a face, tears out a second piece of paper. That one misses too, but it hits the girl behind Keith and bounces off. Lance groans out loud and tries a _third_ time, ignoring Hunk's whispered protests. This time, he really winds up, tongue sticking out slightly as he aims.

"Don't do it Lance," Hunk whispers.

…Lance does it. He throws the tiny paper ball as hard as he can, right at Keith, and…

Right before the ball would have hit, Keith turns around, puts his hand up, and catches it. _'Stop,'_ he mouths, and Lance drops the notebook immediately. He slides down in his seat again, and goes back to waiting impatiently for this lecture to be _over_.

-//-

Since Lance and Hunk are near the back of the room and Keith is stuck right up by the front, the two of them beat him out when orientation finally ends. They're leaning against the wall and waiting for him, watching the stream of cadets passing them by, when all of a sudden Keith just comes running out to join them. He actually shoves a classmate out of his way, then grabs Lance by the elbow and just keeps going. Lance barely has time to half turn and grab Hunk too, to make sure they're both being dragged along together.

"Hey!" he protests. "Where are we going?"

"Don't you want to talk about what just happened?" Hunk adds. "And slow down!"

"I need to see Shiro," Keith says, and Lance glances back at Hunk. Hunk nods, and narrows his eyes a little in focus. Yea. They need to get to Shiro. The last time they'd seen him, he'd just barely been back in his… well, back in _a_ body after dying and being held in the black lion. They need to make sure he's okay.

"Where would he be?" Lance asks as they run. Keith has let go of him by this point so they can all focus on running faster, so Lance lets go of Hunk, too. "You knew him before the Kerberos mission, where did he stay?"

"Doesn't matter," Keith says. "We always met outside the garrison when I needed to talk to him. He'll be waiting."

It's almost comically easy to slip out of the garrison's walls. Compared to _any_ of the galra bases they've been in and out of since leaving Earth, the security here is nothing. Besides, it's the first day for a new cadet class, there are people coming and going, parents making a scene as they drop their kids off at the garrison, plenty of distractions.

Keith leads the way, and it's clear by the way he navigates the streets that he knows this area well. It's not a great part of town, Lance isn't even sure if he's ever been here before, but Keith knows it well.

"You come here a lot?" Hunk pants, and Lance is pretty sure he just wants Keith to slow down for a second. Keith _doesn't_ slow down, but he half turns and explains.

"Used to. After Shiro helped me get into the Garrison, with the junior cadets, we'd meet up here when we needed to talk in private."

"He helped you get in?" Lance asks.

Keith frowns at him, but it's such a distracted, worried frown that Lance doesn't even bother trying to start an argument. "Just with the paperwork," he says. "Because I was in foster care and he was the only one that cared. And he didn't help me get into the pilot program. I did that on my own."

"I figured _that_ ," Lance scoffs. "I've seen you fly."

Keith looks first confused, then suspicious, then very briefly pleased before he turns away to hide it.

They're coming up on a rather grubby looking diner, and Keith slips inside, past the front counter. He makes a beeline to a booth in the back, but when Lance starts to follow, Hunk reaches out to stop him.

"Maybe we let them have a minute first?" he suggests.

Keith pauses at the side of the booth. Leans over. He seems to be saying something, quietly. There's worry in his face.

And then Shiro stands, and he's all in one piece as he and Keith hug. Hunk doesn't even tr to hold Lance back as the two of them run down the line of booths to join the hug. Whatever they're doing here, stuck back at the beginning with no Voltron and no _clue_ what's happening, at least this is a pretty good start.

Now they just have to find Pidge and Allura (maybe? Where would she even _be_?). But hey, one step at a time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I spent about as long trying to think of a decent title and summary as I spent writing the actual first chapter. -_- 
> 
> Anyway, this is a thing which I am trying to write, I hope that you enjoy the thing.


	2. Chapter 2

"So is there anything worth eating here?" Hunk asks, once everyone has kind of calmed down and settled into the booth at the back. 

"Everything's edible," Keith says, which is such a _Keith_ way to answer that question that Hunk doesn't even have it in him to argue. Keith has never seemed to care much about the _quality_ of what he's eating, as long as there's enough of it to keep him from going hungry, and it's not actually going to poison him. 

"Never mind that right now, Hunk," Lance says, leaning (sprawling) over the table. "Isn't anybody else freaking out about this? We're on _Earth_ , guys." 

"Yea," Keith agrees.

"Earth!"

"Lance…"

They all look over at Shiro, who seems… tired. They're all younger here, in the past, but Hunk thinks it shows more with Shiro than any of the rest of them. His hair's all black instead of being all white, he has two normal arms, and his face is missing the scar the galra had given him after Kerberos. His eyes, though… they're tired.

Shiro takes a deep breath and shakes his head. "Lance," he says again. "We don't know why we're here, or what we can do about it. We need to just take a deep breath and plan our next step, okay?"

Hunk raises his foot, ready to give Lance a kick when he decides to say something dumb, but maybe he can see how spent Shiro looks, because he just nods.

"We _should_ get in touch with Pidge, though," Keith says. "She didn't start at the Garrison the same year we did, so she's still on her own."

"Oh man," Lance groans. "She must be freaking _out_." He pauses, then adds, "Or she's figured out exactly what happened and already has a plan to get back to space and form Voltron."

"Either way," Keith says. "We should get in contact with her right away. She needs to know the rest of us are here too."

"What about Allura?" Hunk asks. "She's… oh." He's mentally counting back in time to figure out where she'd be, and the math isn’t really that hard. Until they got to the Castle, she'd been in cryo with Coran.

"She's in a pod," Shiro says. "And we'll need to get out of the solar system to be able to talk to her, so unfortunately that's going to have to wait until we _can_ get off planet."

"Blue," Lance says, sitting up abruptly. "We can find her again, right? No problem. Then she'll take us off planet, back to the Castle, and Bam! Problem solved."

The rest of them all look at each other. "It does seem like the best plan," Keith says. "But we should get in contact with Pidge first. Last time, the blue lion just took off and lead us to the ship—I don't want that happening again if we don't have Pidge with us."

Because Pidge is one of them, and Hunk feels a fierce surge of protectiveness as he nods. No way are they going back into space unless they're _all_ going back into space.

"Great," Lance says, fishing in his pocket for his phone. "So I'll call her up, she can meet us or whatever, and we'll all take Blue back to the Castle, unfreeze Allura, and—" He frowns, thumb hovering over his phone screen. "Does anyone have Pidge's number?"

It's been so long since they've had to worry about _phones_ (they'd been left behind on Earth, replaced by more efficient Altean technology) that for a second Hunk doesn't even understand the question. Then he leans back and groans. "No," he says. "She always refused to give it to us, remember?"

"Oh yea," Lance says.

"Why didn't she give you guys her number?" Keith asks. "Weren't you all on the same simulation team?"

"Well, yes," Hunk says. "But to be fair, Lance was using these really terrible pickup lines to try and get her number."

Lance shrugs. "She didn't want to sneak out and come pick up girls with us, so I was just trying to _include_ her by testing out the pickup lines!"

Keith gives him a flat look. "Okay," he says. "So I guess we all know now why we don't have Pidge's phone number. How else do we get in contact with her?"

Next to him, Shiro shifts, and pulls out his own phone. "I don't know how to get her number," he says. "But I think I know how to get to _her_." He puts the phone on the table in front of him, and the rest of the paladins lean forward almost as one to see what he's doing.

Hunk gets it first, when he sees who Shiro is looking at in his contact list. "Oh!" he says. "Her dad, right?"

"I flew with him on some missions before Kerberos," Shiro says. "I don't think it would be too weird if I found an excuse to go visit."

"Great!" Lance says (too loud). "So you can focus on Pidge, and the rest of us can go work on getting back to Blue."

"We _just_ talked about this," Keith reminds him, with what seems like almost too much patience for how young he looks. Hunk definitely doesn't remember him being this during their first year at the Garrison, or even when they first left Earth. He'd really grown into it, so it's weird to see him fifteen and looking at Lance with that expression of long suffering, just _barely_ holding it together patience. "Lance, if we find Blue she might just sweep us all back out into space and then we'd be leaving Pidge behind."

"We can't leave Pidge behind," Hunk adds.

"You guys think I want to leave Pidge behind?" Lance asks. "No way! But we know way more about the lions now than we did the first time, right? I don't think Blue would just take off before we're ready this time. Maybe she'll even remember."

"You think the Lions would remember everything?" Shiro asks.

"Why not?" Lance says. " _We_ remember."

They all pause to think this over, and at last Keith nods. "Okay," he says. "Maybe we _should_ go see the Blue Lion."

Lance bursts out into chatter immediately, clearly excited about this. The Blue Lion might not be _his_ Lion anymore, not since he moved on to Red, but Hunk knows that Lance of all people would never forget the lion that first carried them away from Earth. How many times, back on the Castle, had he gone looking for Lance only to find him with Blue, talking her robot ear off?

"Hey," Keith says, as Lance continues talking a mile a minute and Shiro does his best to stay engaged. "Can you go with Shiro when he visits Pidge and her family?"  
  
"Instead of going to see Blue with you two?" Hunk asks. "Yea, I'm fine with that. Last time we found Blue, we fell down a waterfall." It had hurt. "Just don't go back into space without us."

"We won't," Keith says, and Hunk had mostly been joking but Keith looks absolutely serious. "I just want to make sure Shiro's not alone right now."

They both glance over at Shiro, trying not to be obvious about it. Luckily, they're far less interesting than the way Lance's hands have started flying around as he talks, gesticulating wildly. Shiro looks fine for now, just tired, but he'd been a spirit trapped in a Lion a few hours ago. Now he's alive and stuck in the past.

"I'll make sure he stays okay," Hunk promises, looking back at Keith. "I promise."

-//-

The sheer disappointment that washes over Lance when they find the Blue Lion is—it's overwhelming, and for a second he's almost in danger of falling over.

"What's wrong?" Keith asks, tensing like he's expecting a fight.

"Me," Lance says, and then instantly regrets it. It's just that… everything had been going so well up to that point. They'd both remembered exactly where Blue would be waiting for them, because how do you forget something like _that_?

"Well, yes," Keith says. "Usually."

Is that supposed to be a joke? Lance is _pretty_ sure that's supposed to be a joke, but Keith can't quite sell it at the moment. His face is too serious.

"What do you mean?" Keith presses when Lance stays quiet. "What's wrong with you?"

"I just mean—Blue isn't connecting to me," he says, looking up at the mammoth Lion. "A _little_ , but not… not enough for me to pilot her. Probably not even enough for her to put her shield down." He steps forward anyway though, just to try, and his heart sinks when he puts his hand on Blue's shield, and nothing happens.

 _Wrong_ , she seems to whisper in his mind, kind but firm, and Lance slumps. "I'm not her paladin anymore," he says. "I mean, you took Black so I took Red and Allura took Blue—and she knows that."

"So the Lions _do_ remember?" Keith asks.

Maybe? It's hard to tell, with only the vaguest connection to the Lion that had once launched him and his friends out of their home solar system. And Lance has missed her before, of course. She's as much his friend as any of the other paladins, and when Allura took over… well, he couldn't pick anyone better to replace him as Blue's pilot, and Lance _does_ like Red just the same, now that they've bonded, but it's not the same, and right now it's just so in his face obvious that he's not the blue paladin anymore…

"Sorry, Keith," Lance says, letting his hand drop. "I just don't think we're getting out of here with Blue."

Keith stares at him. "Not without Allura," he says.

"Right," Lance says, because it sounds like Keith is looking for confirmation.

"Allura," Keith goes on. "Who is in a cryo pod in another solar system."

"Y- _es_ ," Lance says, drawing the word out.

"So basically we can't get out of here without Allura, but we won't be able to wake Allura up until we leave."

They both look up at Blue, and this time Lance doesn't bother to answer. It's too obvious and too depressing to voice his agreement out loud.

"So we're stranded," Keith says at last.

"Yep," Lance agrees. He kicks dejectedly at a loose pebble, watches it bounce away. "And no one in the whole rest of the universe cares that we're stuck here."

-//-

…this is not, strictly speaking, true.

Far away, in the dark heart of Zarkon's command center, Haggar and a circle of her most trusted druids crouch in a circle, reaching out into the universe, searching. They're not looking for anything in particular, just… knowledge. Anything interesting. They do this from time to time, reaching out into the vastness of their master's empire and beyond, a kind of early defense system.

And this time, they find something. A kind of jagged rip in space… no. Not in space, in _time_. And through that time comes a sort of energy. Not quite quintessence, or if it is quintessence, then it's been twisted into doing something Haggar has never felt before.

Interesting, potentially, but not something she can justify throwing too many resources into until she has more information. Zarkon would trust her to do it, more likely, but that's a trust she's carefully nurtured, careful never to give him a _reason_ not to trust her.

A reason, for example, such as sending troops on a pointless invasion on a backwards planet on the other side of the universe. Earth, she learns the locals call it later, when she's done her research, sent out probes, and learned what she can.

Haggar isn't ready to send galra to the planet, but some of their mechanized troops…

She sends those.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be patient as I learn to write everyone in character. Always a challenge in a new fandom. :)


	3. Chapter 3

Pidge has no idea what's going on when she wakes up in her own bed back on Earth. For a confused couple of minutes, she thinks she's still dreaming. Then for a few more minutes after that, she wonders if maybe she's dead. The last thing she remembers is that radiation and if they hadn't gotten away from it fast enough, then maybe…

"Katie!"

Then _maybe_ they really are dead. She hadn't recognized what the radiation actually _was,_ something related to quintessence probably, so that meant she had no idea what the effect would be if it had caught up to them, and death was definitely always a possibility—

"Katie Holt if you aren't down here and dressed in one minute, I'm coming up there to _drag_ you out of bed!"

Pidge sits straight up in bed, eyes wide. She hadn't even reacted to the first shout, because _Katie_ isn't a name that really registers with her anymore. The only person left in space that _might_ call her by her given name is Matt, and this is…

This voice is her mom's.

So maybe she's not dead, maybe she's really back home, maybe for some reason her mom is acting like she never left and nothing ever happened and everything's fine and _what is going on here_?

Something heavy holds her back as she starts to spring out of bed, and after a confused second she realizes it's her hair swinging as she moves. She hasn't had long hair since she left Earth. Even if she's somehow back now, her hair should still be cut short. She hasn't let it get past her chin since she got to the Garrison, first to keep her cover as Pidge Gunderson, and then to make her helmet fit more comfortably once she started piloting the Green Lion. It would take months at least to get it this long again.

Pidge's mind races and she connects the dots all at once. She wants to confirm though, so she pulls up her shirt far enough to  (a T-shirt two sizes too large with the logo of her favorite video game printed on it in an appropriately flashy green) and stares at the place where there is no scar.

She'd gotten it months ago. A stupid fight on an otherwise forgettable planet, and she'd been too slow to dodge—the shot that clipped her hadn't done any permanent damage, it had been easy to take care of the damage, but… it had left a scar. Pidge has assumed that she'll have that scar with her forever.

She rubs her finger over the (whole, undamaged) skin, just to prove to herself that nothing's there. And it _isn't_ , not only is the scar healed but it's like it was never there in the first place. Or…

She lets her gaze drift upward, staring at nothing as she tries to figure out what's going on. The only thing she can think of that would explain everything (waking up at home, her mom calling for her like this is just any normal day, the missing scar) is that she's somehow gone back in time.

"Whoa," Pidge whispers, because _that's_ a new one.

" _Katie_ ," her mom says, and Pidge spins around a second too slow to see her coming in through her bedroom door. "I've been calling and calling, didn't you hear—Katie?"

Pidge can't blame her for being confused, because the second she saw her mom, she'd run at her for a hug. It's just… it's been a really long time. "Sorry," she says, squeezing her eyes closed and not even trying to come up with an explanation for this because there isn't one.

Sure, time travel is a big deal, but Pidge is confident she can figure out what happened and why if she just puts her mind to it. But seeing her mom again, all of a sudden like this without any warning, is something _really_ special.

-//-

It's almost eerie, this reminder of how different her life had been only a few years ago. Pidge can't convince her mom to let her stay home from school, so she spends her day shuffling from one class to the next, hunched over her desk, scribbling calculations and trying to remember _exactly_ what the readings on that radiation had been before it pushed them back in time.

She hears the other kids whispering about her, calling her names behind their hands. _Look at the weird kid, wonder what she's doing—what a nerd._ And she just doesn't care. Once upon a time it would have really bothered her. But now? It makes her smile. She's a paladin of Voltron, pilot of the Green Lion. She's traveled galaxies, and defends the universe.

And yea, she's a nerd.

By the end of the school day, she's come to two conclusions. The first is that she doesn't have enough information to figure out the science behind time travel (disappointing), and the second is that she really needs to find the rest of the paladins (obvious). This is two years before they found the Blue Lion and were blasted into space. Pidge is pretty sure the others would all be at the Garrison at this point, which isn't _great_ but could be worse. Pidge knows how to get in there, and as a fun bonus to the time travel, she hasn't even been banned from the Garrison yet. She could probably just walk right in, pretend she's there to visit her dad or Matt…

When Pidge gets home from school, there's a black van waiting in the driveway with the Garrison's insignia painted on the side. She stops on the sidewalk half a block away and tilts her head to one side, considering. There's no evidence for it, but Pidge feels her stomach turn over with nerves. This has to be because of her, right? She doesn't remember this happening before, and the only thing that's changed is her. She's travelled through time, and now the Galaxy Garrison is at her house—waiting for _her_?

Pidge reminds herself that she's a paladin of Voltron (even if she doesn't have her Lion right now, or her bayard, or her armor… or her team), and that she's not afraid (even if there's definitely something fishy here).

…sometimes an overactive brain can be a curse, Pidge reflects bitterly as she forces herself to walk closer. It's a lot easier to feel nervous when she doesn't have anything to fight with, if it comes to that.

She barely even manages to get inside the front door before she hears the voices, and so of course she stops just to listen a little and try and figure out what's going on.

"…sorry you had to come all the way out here, and Sam's staying at the Garrison until Friday."

That's her mom's voice, and Pidge relaxes a little. So these people, whoever they are, it sounds like they're just here to see her dad. It's… maybe a little strange that they'd drive all the way out here instead of looking for him at the Garrison, but… maybe there's a reasonable explanation, maybe—

"I should have come over the weekend," a second voice says, and Pidge hears herself gasp out loud because she knows that voice _so_ well. It's Shiro. Shiro is here, Shiro is sitting at her kitchen table, chatting with her mom, and _what if he doesn't remember_ , what is she supposed to do then?

Pidge frowns. She's never going to know until she goes inside. She needs more data, and the only way to get it is to actually see Shiro for herself. Pidge squares her shoulders, trying to stand tall and proud—or at least proud, tall's always been kind of a stretch for her—and walks into—

_Holy shit._

She freezes in the front hall, staring into the kitchen where Shiro _and_ Hunk are sitting with her mom. The way they're sitting, the two paladins are facing her, and Pidge is standing behind her mom—and when Shiro sees her walk in, he across the table, straight at Pidge, and winks.

And that's it. That's all the data Pidge needs to know that Shiro still remembers everything that's happened. Hunk's ear to ear smile is just further confirmation of her theory, and she mouths ' _time travel?!'_ at him, and he actually says (out loud), "I know, right?"

"What? Oh."

Pidge tries to look casual as her mom turns around and sees her for the first time. "Katie," she says. "I didn't hear you come in. This is Shiro—"

"Dad's friend," Pidge says, a little too quickly. "Yea, I know him—know _of_ him, I mean, where would I have met him before? I—" She babbles when she gets nervous.

"Come sit with us," her mom says, beckoning her over to the empty chair next to Hunk. "We were just getting to know each other a little. This is Hunk, a cadet at the Garrison that Shiro's going to be mentoring."

It's a decent enough cover story. At least it'll hold for today. Pidge nods a little as she slides into the empty chair, and sits there, vibrating slightly in excitement. When her mom and Shiro are wrapped up in conversation again, Hunk leans over to Pidge.

"This is so weird," he whispers.

"It's _time travel_ ," Pidge whispers back. "Of course it's weird."

"No," he says. "I mean… you have hair, and you're dressed like—oooo-ow, Pidge!"

"Just be glad I'm not wearing heels," she says, just a little smugly. "I'm still me, okay? I didn't change just because this is before I had to pretend to be a boy to sneak into the Garrison."

"Sure," he says. "Yea, okay, I can deal with that, that's totally fine, I—"

"Hunk?"

"Yea Pidge?"

But she just smiles, because she knows now that her team is still with her, and it's going to be okay.

 -//-

Back at the Garrison, Keith and Lance are up on one of the roofs, Lance moping while Keith tries to figure out what's going to happen after this. Getting Pidge back is an easy first step, but after the paladins are all back together, they're going to need a second step, and then another one after that. They need to figure out how to get back into space, back into _Voltron_ , because the only other option is leaving the universe to Zarkon, and that's not even an option at all, really.

It'd be a lot easier though if he didn't keep getting distracted. His knife, the one Krolia had left behind for him, is a heavy, familiar weight under his cadet uniform. Keith keeps feeling it whenever he moves too much or too suddenly, and it's…

He misses her. He'd just gotten used to having a mom, having _his_ mom, and now she's suddenly a dozen galaxies away from him again.

"Hello, Earth to Keith, you in there?"

"What?"

Lance is sprawled out on the roof, flat on his back with his hands cushioning his heads as he watches clouds drift past. "I don't know man," Lance says. "You just seemed pretty out of it."

Keith can't help but snort a little bit at the vast oversimplification of that statement, but it's Lance so he lets it slide. "Just trying to plan," he says.

"What's the point?" Lance asks. "Blue doesn't see me as her pilot anymore, and we don't have any way off the planet if she won't help."

"We're not giving up," Keith says.

"But what are we supposed to _do_?" Lance asks.

"I don't know," Keith says. "Something. We'll figure it out. And in the meantime, we'll…" He hesitates, and turns away from Lance. "Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Lance says. But he sits up, clearly listening hard.

"It sounded like an explosion," Keith says. "From that way."

He and Lance look at each other, then go running off toward the sound. They don't think twice—they might not have their lions right now, but they're still the paladins of Voltron, and at this point, after everything they've been through, running _toward_ danger instead of away just feels like second nature.


	4. Chapter 4

The explosion leads them away from town, but not far _enough_ out of town. That's Lance's first thought when he and Keith find the source of the blast—that these explosions are going to lead more people here, and that's going to be a problem when they stumble on the little fleet of freaking _galra ships_ barely half a mile outside of town.

"Keith," Lance says, his whole body going tense and ready for a fight (only he doesn't have his bayard. Or his armor. And his lion isn't _his_ lion anymore, she's _Allura's_ lion, and all the rest of them are far away and deep in space). "Are you seeing this? _Please_ tell me you're seeing this."

"I'm seeing it," Keith says.

"But what are they doing here?"

Keith doesn't answer for a second, which is fair enough. Lance is feeling a little speechless himself. Well, not speechless, he's never speechless, but definitely extremely confused. This hadn't happened last time—he would have remembered an alien invasion of Earth during his first year at the Garrison.

"It must be because of us," Keith says, saying aloud what Lance is still trying not to think. "We're the only thing that's changed, so they must be here because of _us_."

"But how could they even know?" Lance asks. "We haven't done anything that would attract attention, have we?"

"I don't know," Keith says. "I don't think so." He doesn't take his eyes off the galra to look at Lance as he speaks. "But we need to take these guys out. They're not even really galra, look—they're just sentries. We can take them out."

"Can we, though?" His voice rising a little. "I mean…" Keith's already off and moving. "I guess the answer is yes and I guess we're doing this now!" And since he can't exactly let Keith run into danger without him, Lance dashes after him.

The sentries don't see them until they're right on top of them, and for a minute it looks like things are actually going to go alright. Keith still has his knife, the one he'd used when he fought with the Blades of Marmora, the one his mom had given him. Lance steals a rifle off the first sentry Keith takes out, and it's not quite his bayard but it's good enough.

For a minute, everything really does feel _good_. And then he hears, over the sounds of fighting, one of the sentries saying something. "No win scenario against primitive species. Trigger self destruct. Destroy evidence."

"No!" Lance yells, and he dives at the closest one. It's not going to do anything. This isn't even the one that had shouted. It just makes him feel better as he jumps at the close-ish galra sentry, for the second or two that he's in control.

Then it suddenly hits him that the sentry is red hot, and the words _self descruct_ that he'd heard. Lance scrambles to his feet, putting as much distance as he can between himself and the sentry. It's just in time, too, because there's an explosion, another explosion, bigger this time, and when Lance looks over his shoulder it's all just a smoking pile of rubble. The ship and the sentries are all gone.

"Well that went well," he says, with _extreme_ sarcasm, when they're a safe distance from the smoking crater. "Everything exploded."

Keith gives him a flat look. "No kidding," he says. He doesn't look winded at all, somehow. "We could have used those ships to get out of here."

Oh. _Oh_ , Lance hadn't even thought of that. "We could have—that… aw _man_."

They take a last, dejected look at the destroyed sentries, and the ships smoking behind them. They don't even look like ships and sentries anymore, just… heaps of scrap metal. "Do you think more will come?" Lance asks. "I mean, maybe if they see a whole bunch of them just vanished off the face of the planet."

"Probably," Keith says, and then he glowers. Lance doesn't even need to look at his face to know that he's glowering, because he can hear it perfectly well in his voice. "We should get back and tell the others."

-//-

Hunk and Shiro head back to the Garrison, without Pidge. There had been no casual way to get her away from her home so they could bri ng her back with them, but they _did_ at least get her phone number this time. So that's a good thing.

"Did Lance tell you where he and Keith were going?" Shiro asks, as the two of them trudge back toward the cadet dorms. Hunk's technically not supposed to be away from Garrison property on his own, so Shiro sticks around just to keep people from questioning him.

"He didn't tell me anything," Hunk says. "But he'll probably come looking for me s—"

"Hey Hunk!"

"And there he is," Shiro says, with just the ghost of a smile, as Lance comes running toward them.

"Right on cue," Hunk says. He turns around and waves at Keith, following right behind Lance.

"Hey guys," he says. "So, you'll never believe what we saw. There—"

"Maybe we shouldn't talk about it out in the open," Keith interrupts, turning to check over his shoulder. There's no one else around, but it doesn't make Keith look any less worried. "They're probably still trying to find out what those explosions were."

"Explosions?" Shiro says. "What explosions?"

Hunk looks around nervously, expecting someone to come popping up to ask questions. "Uh," he says. "Maybe Keith's right about waiting until we're not out in the open to talk about it?"

"Let's go back to our dorm room," Lance says. "Keith, you probably have a roommate, right?"

Keith looks momentarily confused, and then visibly remembers that being back at the Garrison means living with a roommate again. He looks… pretty unhappy about it. Hunk and Lance had been lucky to be assigned as roommates their first year, and after that they requested to stay together—but Keith didn't really have friends at this point, did he? So his roommate is probably just someone random.

"Yea," Keith says. "Let's go to your room."

-//-

They conference Pidge in as soon as Keith tells them that the galra had sent sentries down to Earth. She lies stretched out on her bed, listening to it all over video chat, thinking about how ancient her computer seems after their time in space. If she was in the castle, or on her lion, she could have done something, found some information to help. Instead, all she can do is theorize—and even those theories are more like guesses.

"They could have followed us back in time," she suggests, when Keith and Lance are done explaining."

"But there were no galra anywhere close to where we were before we came back in time," Hunk points out.

Pidge points to his image on screen, and instinctively reaches up to push her glasses further up her nose. She stops when she almost face palms instead, and remembers that she's not wearing them. Matt had given them to her when he went to the Garrison, but she barely even looked at them until she enrolled herself. Maybe she'll have to start wearing them again.

"That's true," Pidge allows. "So they're from this time, and they just… decided to come to Earth all of the sudden?"

"I'm suspicious," Lance says, and this time, Pidge's face palm is entirely intentional.

"Of course you're suspicious," she says. "There's nothing _not_ suspicious about galra sentries crash landing right outside the garrison."

Lance, who had been leaning forward, crowding the other four out of frame, leans back again with his arms crossed. "Okay fine," he says. "So it's suspicious, what do we do about it?"

"We'll have to keep an eye out," Keith says. "In case it happens again."

"Whoa," Hunk says. "You think they'll send more?"

"I don't know," Keith says. "But if they do, I don't think we can take the risk of the Garrison or anyone else finding out about it."

"We can work something out," Shiro says.  "Patrols or something."

"I can set up some kind of alert system too," Pidge adds. "Maybe some kind of CCTV system hooked up to a predictive algorithm based on what we know of galra troop behavior and—"

Shiro interrupts, speaking for the first time. "Pidge," he says. "Hold up."

And she does, because it's Shiro, and he's been so quiet since they got back, and she's worried. He's been dead for a long time, after all, and now they're time traveling, and this has to be harder on him than any of the rest of them. "Yea, Shiro?" she asks.

"You're going to draw attention to yourself just by coming out here to set that system up," he says. "I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but maybe Hunk should run point on this."

"Uh," Hunk says. "Not to argue, or anything, but Pidge could get it done better than I could."

"And it'd be _best_ if we could work on it together," Pidge adds. They're more than used to it by now—all that time on the Castle of Lions, trying to piece together Altean technology has really paid off. "Listen, guys, I really need to be there—at the Garrison, with the rest of you."

A moment of dead silence greets this announcemen, then Lance leans into frame and says, "Yea, sounds cool! How fast can you get here?"

"Wait a second." That's Shiro, gently pushing Lance slightly to the side. Pidge can't see, with the two of them taking up most of the camera space, but it sounds like Lance has backed up into Keith because Keith says " _Ow, Lance—_ " and then the two of them start bickering as Shiro looks into the camera.

"Pidge," he says. "How old are you?"

She bristles. "Sixteen," she says.

 "No," Shiro says. "How old are you right now, three years in the past?"

She frowns at him. " _Thirteen_ ," she grumbles.

"You can't be here without drawing attention to yourself," Shiro says. "You can get into the Garrison at your age, but you wouldn't be in the flight program, and you have your family where you are."

Pidge gives him a look. "I'm not going to abandon my family," she says. "But Dad and Matt are at the Garrison, remember, and…" She almost can't even believe she has to say this out loud. "And you guys are my family too."

-//-

A quiet year passes.

Well, _quiet_.

Pidge wastes no time getting herself enrolled at the Garrison, which her parents and brother seem to take pretty much in stride. She is a Holt, after all. No one's too surprised that she wants to stick to the family business, and go into the Garrison.

And this time, she's proud to be able to enroll under her own name--even if she'll never ask the other paladins to start calling her Katie.

She and Hunk get to work on tracking down any more galra that might have come to Earth, and they find them. And then they keep finding them. Every couple of months or so, _someone_ sends a ship or two of sentries down to Earth. Without the equipment they're used to, it's all they can do to keep the sentries from being found by everyone else, which is good. What's bad is that no matter how hard they try, they never manage to get their hands on a working ship.

So they're still stranded on Earth when, one year later, Shiro says, "I know how we get back to space."

By this point, they've almost given up hope. Lance is still going to visit Blue, almost every week—he'll talk to her, or sit and do his homework close by. There's no sign that she's ever going to consent to take them back to space without her proper paladin, and with humanity's less than stellar space program, they're starting to quietly give up hope.

"How do we do it?" Hunk asks. "You have a plan?"

"Yea," Shiro says, and he seems to almost chew his words over before saying, "Kerberos."

And the rest of the paladins just erupt into protests as they realize he's actually planning to be captured by the galra again.

"I escaped last time," Shiro says. "I can escape again, but go after the castle of lions instead of flying back here. Once Allura's awake, she should remember everything that happened, and we'll be able to come back here for the rest of you. I know it's not ideal, but—"

"No," Keith says. "Shiro, _no_. You can't do this."

Shiro shakes his head. "There's no other choice, Keith," he says quietly. "And you know it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know what's weirdly hard? Time skips. Time skips are really weirdly hard.


	5. Chapter 5

Pidge teams up with Keith almost immediately. " _No_ ," she says, her voice uncharacteristically shrill. "Shiro, Keith's right, you can't. You can't just go to Kerberos and get captured by galra, it's not—that's not the right way to do this." Especially because it won't just be him going, it's going to be her dad and her brother and she can't just let them _go_. Just because they survived last time doesn't mean they'll survive this time, and even if they do—

It's going to hurt them.

"Pidge…" Shiro looks at her like he gets it, but his voice is sad and resigned. "I get it, I get why you'd be upset about it—"

"I can't let them go back up there again," Pidge says fiercely. "Shiro, I _can't_. I spent such a long time worrying about them, and I can't go back to that. None of you has families that are up there in danger, you don't know what it's like to… to not know if they're okay, just that they're _out_ there, in the universe somewhere."

"I get it," Keith says abruptly.

Pidge turns and gives him a look. She's not willing to give up on this, because it's not just about her being stubborn. It's about keeping her family safe, and she's never going to bend on that.

"My mom is out there somewhere," Keith says, gesturing vaguely upward. "She's spying on Zarkon's troops, and I _know_ she made it safely through last time, but that doesn't mean she will this time." His gaze drifts upward as well, in that slightly distracted way he sometimes has, like he's forgotten he's supposed to engage with people when he talks to them. They're all used to it by now. "I want to see her again, but I can't. I have to find her all over again, but I know… she wouldn't be happy if I put finding her again in front of fighting Zarkon." He remembers to look back down, at her, and Pidge squirms.

Sometimes, it's easy to forget that he's the black lion's paladin—that eventually, he was chosen to be the head of Voltron. And then sometimes, like now, it's way too easy. "What about you?" Keith asks. "What do you think your dad or your brother would say if you put their safety above the rest of the universe?"

Pidge wavers—but stays stubborn. "We need to try to think of something else," she says. "Anything else."

"I mean… I don't want to see it happen either," Hunk says, adding in his two cents. "But Pidge, there's no other way up there."

"Yea," Lance adds, because Lance can never stay quiet about anything. "Pidge, you have to think about it, though—"

"You know what?" Pidge says. "I _am_ going to think it through, because there has to be another way!" She's so mad they'd even suggest this, and so scared too, because in the deepest, most logical and least emotional part of her mind she's doing the calculations, and not liking what she's coming up with.

"Pidge…" Shiro walks over, puts his hand on her shoulder. "I've thought about this for a long time—trust me, it's not something I want to go through again either." She feels his hand—his right hand, the one he's going to lose if he goes back to Kerberos and gets captured by the galra again—tense slightly where it rests on her shoulder. "I'm only bringing it up because I can't think of any other way to get back to the castle."

Pidge reaches out for something. Anything. Any other way off the planet that doesn't involve putting her family in danger. They don't have any ships of their own. Blue won't let Lance pilot her, and the galra sentries that keep coming down to Earth self destruct before they could actually be _useful_ , and Pidge hasn't been able to find a way around that yet. She's put some serious effort into it too, so she's not sure if it's ever going to happen. So that leaves—what? She could try and rig a signal that would be strong enough to pick up from space, but odds are that no one would hear it but the galra. There isn't exactly a surplus of… of other…

"Kaltenecker," she blurts out.

"What?" Shiro says. "What… what?"

"You leave my cow out of this," Lance says, eyes going slightly shifty.

"No," Pidge says. "I mean—that guy at the space mall who sold us Kaltenecker. He had all that earth stuff, didn't he?"

"Oh yea," Lance says. "He had all those video games and stuff!"

"So that means he must have been on Earth!" Pidge says. "He was _here_ , and probably not too long before we saw him, because how long do cows even live?"

"Eighteen to twenty two years," Hunk says at once. When everyone stares at him, he makes a face and shrugs. "What?" he say, like that's a perfectly normal thing to just know off the top of his head.

Pidge lets this pass. "So if he's coming to Earth, we can just—"

"Stake out every cow?" Keith asks. "Pidge…" he takes a deep breath, and she can see that whatever he's about to say is _obviously_ not something he wants to tell her. "There have got to be millions of cows on Earth, we have _no way_ to track which one that alien is going to steal. And even if we did, we don’t know when he's going to be here, and how would we convince him to—

Pidge has stopped listening. Okay, so maybe cows are a little unreasonable, but there are other options. Some of those games had been crazy rare, the kind of thing people would sell on ebay for hundreds of dollars. Maybe not the easiest thing in the world to track, but possible, and better than sending Shiro and her family back to Kerberos to be captured by Zarkon's troops. She dives for her computer and starts tapping away, muttering to herself as she does so. She's vaguely (distantly) aware of the others staring at her, of Hunk opening his mouth like he wants to talk her into just letting this go, letting it happen—

Shiro puts his hand on Hunk's arm. "Let her work it out for herself," he says softly, and so while they talk about Shiro's crazy Kerberos plan as if it's _actually going to happen_ , Pidge keeps working. There has to be something she can do. Has to be.

-//-

A month and a half later, Pidge has grudgingly come to terms with the fact that there's nothing she can do, and that Shiro's crazy Kerberos plan is actually going to happen.

There's no good way to track any potential cow or video game stealing aliens, and Pidge doesn't have a plan B. Plan B _is_ Kerberos, and it's awful but since it is, apparently, their only choice they have, she's going to make sure it goes as well as possible. So, while everyone else is focused on getting Shiro there safely and making sure he'll have what he needs to get out again, Pidge goes to her brother instead.

She's not supposed to leave the cadet dormitories after lights out, but it's not the first time she's snuck out in the middle of the night to see Matt. Since she doesn't have a history of breaking into confidential computer records (not in this reality, anyway) (or at least, she hasn't been _caught_ in this reality), and since she's just going to spend time with her brother, people tend to turn a blind eye.

Matt's been employed by the Garrison full time since he graduated, and that means he has quarters of his own on Garrison property. His room isn't too far from where their dad stays when he's on property, actually—home is nearby, of course, but at times like this, when they're close to being sent out on a mission, they're usually expected to stay on the base.

Tonight, when Pidge hacks the lock on Matt's door and pads inside, she's not entirely surprised to find that he's still awake, hunched over his computer and so deep in concentration that he doesn't even hear her until she's practically right on top of him. Something in Pidge twists when she sees what he's looking at—schematics for the ship that's going to take them to Kerberos.

"Hey Matt," she says, and he jumps and gets tangled up in his headphones for a second before pulling them out. Pidge hears a line or two of something sad and slow (he always claims it helps him to focus) before he grins up at her.

"Hey Katie. What are you doing here this late?"

"I…" She walks across the small room to sit on her bed, and looks over at him, dead serious. "I…" How is she supposed to say this? She can't just tell Matt exactly what's going to happen, he'll think she's crazy, and he won't listen.

"Katie?" He sits down on the bed too, cross legged. "C'mon, Pidge, what's wrong?"

She heaves a sigh, squares her shoulders, and looks Matt right in the eyes. "Okay," she says. "Look, you're going to need to learn how to fight."

Obviously that's the last thing Matt had expected, because his reaction is to stare at her with his mouth hanging open. "Why?"

Because he's going to be a captive of the glara for a long time, and after he gets out he's going to join up with the rebellion—and maybe Pidge can't tell him exactly what's going to happen, but she can give him what he needs to survive. Their dad would ask questions, and _insist_ on getting the answers, but Pidge has a feeling Matt will trust her.

"Come on," she says, ignoring the question entirely as she climbs off the bed. "I'm going to teach you to fight."

" _You're_ going to—"

"Yes, Matt." She doesn't have her bayard or her armor, but she's learned more than enough in her time as a paladin of Voltron, because she's _had_ to. "Please, just trust me?"

"Okay," he says. "But I'm pretty sure I can take yo—agh!"

There's a thud as Pidge throws him to the ground, and then silence before she leans over to offer him a hand up. He hesitates, and she can see him thinking about arguing—but then he takes her hand, and gets up to try again.

-//-

Teaching Matt to fight is harder than Pidge had expected (and sometimes, when she's feeling more pragmatic than charitable, she wonders how long it had taken for him to pick it up from the rebels). She starts sneaking out almost every night to see him, and after a while, she's pretty sure he'll at least be able to hold his own. Or if nothing else, he'll be able to learn.

It's a relief to both of them when Pidge shows up in Matt's room one night and says, "You should learn these."

The papers she lays out in front of him have the galra alphabet written out—their spidery letters, which Pidge has never been able to think of as anything but cruel, creeping across the page.

"What is it?" Matt asks, picking up the paper and frowning down at it. "I've never seen anything like it."

"Doesn't matter," Pidge says. "But they're important." She's pretty sure Matt will be able to _understand_ the galra, but she knows from personal experience that it's harder to pick up written languages in space than spoken ones. It'll help him to have a head start.

"Why do I have the feeling you know something I don't?" Matt asks.

She gives him her best cheeky grin. "I know _lots_ of things you don't," she says, and although Matt clearly doesn't think that's enough of an answer, he lets it go. "Okay," he says. "So teach me your weird spider language, or whatever."

"Okay," Pidge says. "And then after that, maybe we can go over explosives for a little while?"

"Explosives?"

"Can't hurt."

"Pidge! That's exactly what explosives _do_ , they hurt people!"

"Okay," Pidge says. "That's true, but—I mean, ideally you want them to be hurting other people, right? Not you?"

"Why would I even be around explosives?" Matt asks. "Why do you want me to know this language, or learn how to fight?"

It's the first time since that first night that Matt has pressed her for answers, and for a long minute she just stares off into the middle distance, not quite sure how to answer. When she finally drags her gaze back to her brother's face, she still doesn't know what to say. Luckily, it seems like her expression is enough to make Matt realize something's wrong.

"If you can't tell me," he says. "Then… I guess you can't."

"I can't," Pidge says quietly. "I really can't."

"Not anything?" Matt asks.

She can feel tears welling up in her eyes, and blinks them back aggressively. "Take care of Dad," she says. Her voice is breaking from the effort of not letting the tears through.

"Dad?"

"Yea." Pidge wishes she could look at something else, anything else other than his face, but she can't. He deserves her attention. "Promise, Matt?"

And he looks at her, and he says, "I promise."

-//-

A few months later—far away, on the other side of the universe—the witch Hagar learns that a small, backwater planet called Earth is sending a ship out to the edges of its own solar system, and her interest is picqued.

After all, she's been sending sentries down to that backwater planet for years now, and not one has survived the journey. There has to be _something_ special going on with that planet. "Go after this ship," she tells her druids. "And bring it back to me. I want to see these Earthlings for myself."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter wasn't supposed to be so much about Pidge, but she just turned out to be way too much fun to write.


	6. Chapter 6

Something has happened to the Kerberos mission.

Every morning when Keith wakes up, that's his first thought, and every night before he falls asleep, it flashes through his mind like a horrible reminder. _Something happened to them, and you need to fix it._

It's been six months since they were captured, and if everything went according to plan (as if anything _ever_ goes according to plan, Shiro would have brought the castle of lions or at least a ship to get them away from Earth. But nothing has happened, Shiro hasn't come back, and…

And Keith has no idea what to do. They'd all supported Shiro leaving—even Pidge had come around eventually—because it was their only option. There is nothing better that they can do, and now that the Kerberos mission is gone (lost? Please not lost), Keith's not sure what else they can do. They're stranded on Earth.

For now, anyway. Eventually… eventually they'll figure something out. They'll get out of here, they'll get back out there into the universe. In the meantime, because there's no other choice, they just… keep going with life at the garrison. With homework that's almost _laughable_ in how little they're supposed to know about the universe and space travel. With Lance or sometime Hunk insisting on team bonding meetings that are never quite as bad as Keith expects they will be.

With simulations.

By this point, the first time around, Keith had already punched Iverson in the face and stormed off to the desert. This time, knowing what he does, and with his team still here, he's managed to resist the impulse. It's been difficult. But at least not punching Iverson means that he's still in the fighter class with everyone else. It means on days when the cadets get to run missions in the simulator, after Keith has had his turn, he gets to linger in the back and watch Lance, Hunk, and Pidge run through _their_ mission.

"Oh," he mutters, about thirty seconds into the mission, raising his eyebrows. Then—"O… _kay_?"

Lance had been moved up from cargo pilot to fighter class after only one semester, but he's never quite gotten over the impulse to crow about it, or to show off every single time he gets into the simulator. This time, clearly, is no exception. When Lance flips the ship over a full three hundred and sixty degrees before landing it and successfully completing the mission, a few other cadets actually burst into _applause_ , and their instructor launches into a lengthy lecture of _look at everything this team did right._

Keith can practically see Lance inflating with pride at the praise, and decides he needs to do something about that.

If nothing else, it's going to be entertaining.

When class is over, but before their classmates have started to disburse, Keith pushes through the crowd to get to the other classmates. "You guys did a good job," he says.

"Thanks," Lance says, and opens his mouth to… who knows, to make some typically Lance-ish boast, but Keith cuts him off before he can get a word out.

"Hunk," he says, "Pidge, you did great. Lance, on the other hand."

"Cool," Pidge says.

"Hey," Lance says, switching course immediately. "What's wrong with my piloting? That was _great_ piloting."

"It was fine," Keith says. "But it was a little showy. You could have gotten that mission done faster and safer if you hadn't been—"

"Oh come _ooooon,_ Keith—"

"If you hadn't been showing off."

"Showing off? Keith!" This is clearly getting to Lance, and Keith has to bite back a smile. Part of the reason he'd wanted to do this is because he genuinely feels that with Shiro gone, he has a sort of responsibility as the other paladin of the black lion to make sure they all stay in fighting form. But also… honestly, Lance's flying _hadn't_ been that bad, and he doesn't mind provoking Lance, occasionally.

"That was obviously showing off," Keith says. "What if people had been depending on you and you crashed—"

"I wasn't going to _crash_ —"

"You might have—"

"Keith, we did fine!"

Keith bites the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.

"McClain," their instructor calls. He looks thoroughly confused by the whole interaction, but by this point is clearly sick of it. "Kogane. That's enough. Move on."

They look at each other, and Keith finally can't bite back his grin.

"Keith," Lance gasps, as they join the rest of their class heading out of the simulation deck. "Are you… are you _messing_ with me?"

"No," Keith says.

"Keith!"

He gives in slightly. "You did some good flying," he says. "Hopefully we'll be back up there with Voltron soon, and you'll definitely be ready for that."

But there's no stopping Lance from his dramatic, full blown complaints, and Keith leaves him to it. By unspoken consensus, they head up for the roof, where they spend most of their time after classes these days. They're all hoping for some news from beyond the edge of the solar system, and Pidge and Hunk between them have managed to rig up a pretty beefy receiver, and if there's any news from Shiro, they'll hear it there first.

"I just don't know why you have to say stuff like that in front of _everybody_ ," Lance says, stretching out on his usual, slightly shady spot on the roof.

"Mm hmm," Keith says. He pulls out his knife and starts running through a few drills he'd learned while he was with the Blades, while Hunk and Pidge huddle around their equipment.

"I mean, obviously it's not that big of a deal," Lance goes on, clearly not noticing that none of the others is actually listening to him anymore. "Because we're all great pilots, and we all know that, but what is everybody else going to think?"

"I guess they'll think that you were showing off," Keith says, following up a quick lunge at an imaginary enemy with a half step forward and to the side.

"That's just—"

"Hey," Hunk says suddenly. "Guys?"

He's obviously trying to stop the argument, but Keith doesn't feel much like arguing anyway, so he lets it happen. "Yea?"

"This is the day we met," Hunk says, and for a second Keith just looks at him blankly.

"Well I guess it's not like… it's not the first day we all _met_ ," Hunk says. "But it's the day Shiro got away from the galra and made it back here, remember?" He points at Keith. "And you set off all those explosives as a distraction—"

"Oh yea," Lance says. "I remember that." He pokes at Hunk's foot with his. "You said it was aliens, remember?"

"And I was sort of right," Hunk points out, gesturing again. "That was Keith, and Keith is technically part Galra."

Lance laughs at that, and even Keith has to crack a smile. Once, Hunk making jokes about his galra heritage would have pissed him off (and it would have _hurt_ ), but he's long past that point now. Knowing his mom, knowing where he comes from and what he's fighting for makes a difference. But the smile fades quickly, and Keith glances upward. "I guess that's not happening this time, is it?"

"Cheer up," Pidge says flatly. "Maybe we'll get some more sentries."

This doesn't cheer Keith up at all. He sighs, and stretches himself out on the roof, and the four paladins (or ex-paladins, or future-paladins) sit and watch the stars in silence.

Just in case.

-//-

Shiro does not know exactly why his memories of being with the galra the first time are so spotty, but he really wishes he could forget what happening to him now.

Haggar has taken an interest in them, in all three of them, in him and Sam and Matt, and he has no idea how long they've been here but he knows for a _fact_ that they should have been sent away by now—Sam to work with the captured alien scientists, himself and Matt to fight. This time, she's kept them, and their lives have become a never ending chain of torture and interrogations and experiments that Shiro doesn't know the purpose of (but at this point, he's wondering if he got off lightly last time with a metal arm and a clone).

Days and nights blur together, until finally, eventually, something happens.

Ulaz.

He comes to the room where Shiro and the Holts are being held, and Shiro can guess just by his expression the thoughts that must be going through his mind—he'd have second thoughts about breaking out prisoners that look like them too. He's tried to take as much of Haggar's attention as he can, so the Holts are doing slightly better than he is, but they're all a little bit worse for the wear.

"Please," Shiro says, and his voice is a dull croak—he hasn't spoken in a long time, too scared of accidentally giving something away to Haggar. She's so much more aggressive than she had been before, she's so much more _interested_ in them.

Ulaz turns to look at him, and Shiro shakes his head. He isn't entirely sure that he's in a fit state to _walk_ , but… "Please," he says. "Help them get out." And he points with a shaking finger toward the Holts.

"Shiro—"  
  
" _Matt_ ," he says, and this time he manages to muster enough force that Matt actually listens, and goes quiet. Shiro looks back at Ulaz, who has come closer and looks, frankly, utterly confused.

"You would trust me," he says. "Just like that?"

"This… really isn't the time to explain," Shiro says, and his eyes flick sideways to the door, half expecting Haggar to just… walk through it.

"Fair enough," Ulaz says, with a kind of grim humor. "Whatever your story is, this is not the time or the place to share it."

"I can't walk right now," Shiro says, trying to keep his voice as forceful as he can. "But you _have_ to take them. Please."

A scraping, shuffling noise from the other side of the rom tells Shiro that Matt is hauling himself to his feet. "We're not leaving you here," he says. "No _way_ , Shiro."

"He's right," Sam says. "You'll never get out once the witch finds out we're gone."

Ulaz looks around at all three of them, considering, then nods. He mutters something under his breath (to Shiro, who is listening hard, it sort of sounds like _Kolivan is going to_ kill _me_ ), then goes to Shiro and helps him up. "Can either of you fight?" he asks, looking at the Holts.

"I can," Matt says, surprising Shiro a little. "Sort of. My sister taught me."

…because of course she had. Honestly, Shiro doesn't know why he's surprised.

"Then now is your time to learn," Ulaz says. "And learn quickly. Follow me."

Shiro loses consciousness two or three times as Ulaz half carries, half drags him through the ship. He doesn't know exactly how badly Haggar has hurt him—he knows she's replaced his arm with a cybernetic one, but he's used to that by now—and all this moving around is knocking sore spots and reopening half healed injuries. The next time he's fully aware of his surroundings again, he's pressed into a tight corner, Sam and Matt together holding him up while Matt presses a hand over his mouth. Ulaz is a few feet away, his entire body tense. Shiro makes eye contact with Matt and nods, and the younger man takes his hand away. Points down a hallway and around a corner. Shiro can't see anything, so he strains his ears and listens instead.

"—lings have escaped," a voice says, and Shiro identifies it instantly as Haggar's. "Find them. Find out how they escaped, and then…" A brief pause. "Bring the escape to Zarkon's attention."

Ulaz curses under his breath, a harsh word in galran that Shiro has only heard once or twice before, in passing.

"They're primitives," a second voice says. On of her druids, probably. "Are you sure you want Lord Zarkon involved?"

"Don't _question_ me," Haggar spits back at him. "Do as I say. There is something off about those people, and that planet—there is something else there, and it's time we sent our soldiers down in force…"

Her voice fades into silence as she and the other druid keep walking. The instant they're out of earshot, the three escapees and Ulaz start moving again. Even Shiro is trying to walk under his own power now—it's not _helping_ very much, but he can't be still and let the others carry him when they've just heard that—and finally they reach an escape ship.

"Go," Ulaz says. "I need to stay here or my cover will be blown—the ship's destination is programmed into the computer already, and there are people there that will help you. Tell them Ulaz sent you, and that you need help."

"Wait," Shiro says. He puts a hand on the wall to brace himself, and looks back at Ulaz. "That's our planet they're sending troops to—we need to get a message back to them."

"You want to contact the garrison?" Sam asks. "Shiro, we both know they don't even have the technology to pick up on transmissions from this far away, and even if they heard it…" His hopeless expression just about sums it up, but Shiro knows something he doesn't. He knows that the paladins of Voltron are on Earth.

"Just do it," Shiro says. "Ulaz, please."

He hesitates, but only for a second. "Fine," he says curtly. "I'll broadcast a warning to Earth, but _go_ , now!"

Matt drags Shiro into the ship, and they go, flying off to what Shiro assumes is a Blades of Mamora base. Sam volunteers to take the controls—and to be honest, the ship is basically on autopilot, so there's not much for any of them to do—and Shiro collapses in a corner. "Come on, guys," he whispers, although he knows he's half a universe away from the other paladins being able to hear him. "It's all up to you now."

-//-

"Guys," Pidge says. "I'm picking something up."

It's late by this point—or very early, technically—and they'd been getting ready to pack up and get back to their rooms before anyone notices.

"What is it?" Hunk asks, leaning over and squinting at the tiny screen Pidge had… repurposed from one of the garrison's laboratories. "Oh… oh, that's _not_ good."

"What?" This time it's Lance shoving himself closer, squeezing between the two of them (Pidge reaches back with one hand and pushes him a little to one side, far enough away that she can't feel him breathing on her neck anymore).

"It's a warning," she says. "The galra are sending troops here, to Earth. Real troops this time, not just the sentries."

"Let me see," Keith says, and they all shuffle aside to let him get close too. They must look absolutely ridiculous, four teenagers huddled around a jerry rigged alien frequency scanner. He frowns at the message scrolling across the screen for a second, then says, "That's a channel the Blades use."

"So this is for real?" Hunk asks. "I mean, if it's a Blades channel, then that means it's not the galra empire trying to trick us or anything, right? It's real?"

"It must be," Keith says. "We _have_ to get off planet, now—" He squints at the message again. "It's going to take at least eight vargas for the empire's ships to get here, so we have time to do something, _if_ we can get off planet—if we could only get to—"

"Our lions," Lance says, jumping to his feet and charging toward the edge of the roof, where an emergency ladder will take them down to ground level.

"Lance, where are you going?" Keith calls after him.

"Blue!" he calls back, not even pausing.

"We've _tried_ that," Keith says. "She hasn't responded to you so far, why would she start now?"

"Because we _need_ her now," Lance says, voice fading slightly as he starts down the ladder. Then he pops back up, so that just his head is visible over the edge of the building. "And she knows it!"

"She knows it?" Hunk echoes.

"She's calling me!" Lance shouts, and after the second or two it takes for that to sink in, they're all scrambling after him, pushing each other to get to the ladder and down it. Despite the circumstances, Pidge is pretty sure she's not the only one with a sort of… hopeful feeling.

They're going back to space.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only one (or MAYBE two) more chapters to go. I'm planning to end this once everyone is rescued and the paladins are back in space, because honestly I have no idea what to do after that anyway. xD


	7. Chapter 7

Lance is only about… seventy two percent sure that the blue lion is going to let him pilot it. The pull in his mind (in his heart) is so strong he can feel it from the garrison rooftop, miles before they get to the desert. But on the other hand… she hasn't listened to him yet. In the whole time they've been here, she's never seemed at all interested in him—she's waiting for Allura.

"Here's the plan," Keith says. They're in the garage, waiting for Hunk to finish hotwiring a hoverbike. "You just need to convince the blue lion to work with you long enough to get back to the castle. Then Allura can take over piloting Blue, and we should be able to get the rest of the lions back pretty quickly."

"Can't _wait_ ," Pidge says, and Hunk gives an absentminded sort of thumbs up from behind the hoverbike.

"After that, we come right back here," Keith goes on. "Zarkon's forces are heading for Earth. We need to be back here to stop—"

"Hey! What are you kids doing in here?"

The door to the garage slams open, revealing a pair of garrison officers on the other side.

"Hunk," Keith snaps. "Do you have that bike ready yet?"

"Got it!" Hunk jumps up and slams his palm against the bike, which rumbles as it powers up.

"Everybody on!" Keith shouts, and they pile up onto the hoverbike after him.

"Hey," Lance says, laughing. "Remember we did this last time, and we almost crashed because we were too heavy?"

"I remember," Keith says. "But last time we had Shiro with us too."

Right. Lance feels the laughter fade—this time, they have to go _rescue_ Shiro. When they're all on and as secure as they can get, Keith almost leaps onto the controls and before the officers can do more than shout, they're rocketing off, toward the desert.

It takes a while, getting there, and to Lance it seems like hours. When Keith stops the hoverbike as close as they can get it to the blue lion, Lance almost falls off the bike and goes running into the cave. He can hear his friends' footsteps running after him, but he can also hear (and feel) Blue calling him, so he goes on, taking the now familiar path until he drops at last into the cavern where she's been waiting.

"You ready, Blue?" he shouts, voice bouncing off the walls, and she _moves_ , for the first time in two years, she stands and she roars, welcoming him in. Lance actually jumps, kind of spinning around in mid-movement as he punches the air and shouts an enthusiastic _"Woo hoo!"_

"We're going?" Pidge shouts.

"We're going!" Lance yells back at her. The other paladins are still clambering down through the hole, even as Lance dances over to Blue, then back to the hole. "Come on! I'm in Blue already!"

"No you're not!" Keith shouts back down at him. He sounds vaguely annoyed.

"We're leaving the galaxy," Lance says, and makes a noise imitating a ship blasting out. "Bye guys, we're already gone!"

"Lance, stop it—"

"Just get down here already!" he yells up at them, and as they drop down through the hole (finally) after him, Lance runs up into Blue and gets himself ready to fly. He's giddy with an almost nauseating mix of excitement and fear—this is his first time flying in years, but also Zarkon's sending troops down to attack Earth, and Earth is his _home_. It's where his family lives.

He needs it safe.

"Everyone in?" he asks, when the rest of the paladins have followed him up. He pauses with his finger over the launch switch, and waits for the three affirmative answers before (with all appropriate drama) flipping the switch.

Blue blasts off, carrying them out of the cave, out of Earth's atmosphere, and through a wormhole that just forms out of nothing in the empty space in front of them.

"This is it," he says, lifting his hands off the controls as Blue takes over to fly them through.

"We're going home," Keith says, so quietly that Lance isn't sure he'd meant for anyone to hear him. Lance decides to pretend he hasn't, and instead just keeps his eyes fixed on the view in front of him.

The wormhole.

Then space.

Arus.

And then, finally, the Castle of Lions, in all her fantastic, familiar glory.

Hunk lets out a heartfelt cheer, and the rest of the paladins join him, Lance almost yodeling with excitement. Now that they can see the castle, now that he knows they'll have Allura and Coran back with hem soon, he feels so much less worried. Sure, they'll still need to track down their lions, but that'll be easy! They've done that before, and as soon as they get them, they can go save Earth.

Lance is careful landing Blue—Allura would kill him if he hurt her lion—and then they all go running into the Castle.

"We have to get to the pods," Pidge says. "That's where Allura and Coran will be." They don't wait as the Castle goes through it's start up routine, lights slowly flickering on for the first time in ten thousand years. They already know where they're going.

Pidge goes to the control panel and in a few perfunctory keystrokes, she's gotten the pods open.

Lance is standing right in front of Allura's pod when it opens for her, and he catches her by the shoulder as she starts to topple forward.

"What…" Her eyes, heavy from the pod, go wide when she sees where she is. "Why are we in the Castle? _How_?"

She looks steadier now, so Lance lets go of her. "We went back in time," he says, explaining as quickly as he can. "Pidge says it's Lotor's fault, or something, which I can _totally_ believe—" Because he's happy to believe _everything_ is Lotor's fault. "But I don't… _really_ get it?"

"But we really… we are back in time? We're going to have to start over saving the universe?"

"Yea," Lance says. "Pretty much, only this time we have to start on Earth—there are galra troops headed there."

"Oh no," she says, and by the pain in her eyes he knows she's not thinking of their home, but hers. Altea is gone, but they _will_ save Earth. "Well… we can't let that happen, now can we?"

"No," Lance says forcefully. He realizes suddenly that they've all gathered in a circle, the five paladins with only Shiro missing.

"So," Allura says. "I assume you all have a plan?"

"We need to get the other lions," Keith says. "I know the Black Lion is here, but the other three—"

"We know where Green and Yellow are," Hunk interjects. "They'll still be on the same planets we found them on, right? They wouldn't let anyone else take them away."

"Not Red," Lance says, because last time they'd been lucky enough to have the galra bring the ship with the Red Lion right to Arus (to _attack_ Arus, sure), but he has no idea if they'll be that lucky this time.

"I can probably find the Red Lion," Allura says, and because she's connected to the Lions, Lance believes her. "I just need a little while to focus."

"We need you to take Hunk down to get _his_ lion though," Keith says.

"Oh yea," Lance says with an eye roll. He'd had to do that last time, when he'd been Blue's paladin. "Remember how many galra there were on that planet?"

" _So_ many galra," Hunk agrees.

"So I'd rather not have him go down in a shuttle," Keith says. "The Blue Lion has better protection and weapons."

"What about me?" Pidge asks. "I need to get to the Green Lion."

"You and Lance take a shuttle—"

"Keith, I want to go after Red!"

"We don't even know where Red _is_ ," Keith says. "Go take Pidge down to get her lion, and while you're down there I'll try and get in touch with the Blade that sent us that warning—they should have intel on where the galra are keeping the Red Lion. I should know where you need to go when you get back."

" _Fine_ ," Lance whines.

"Are we going to have enough energy to power the wormholes we need?" Hunk asks. "I mean, we need one to get to the Yellow Lion, one to get to the Green Lion, one to get to the Red Lion, and another one to get to Earth, and then we need to get _back._ And the Castle has been in hibernation for ten thousand years, it's going to need charging, right?"

"Yea," Pidge says. "But we can take care of that, I think we know enough about how the castle works by now to squeeze a little bit of extra juice out of it."

"You think?"

"Oh yea. If we just recalibrate the—"

"You can't get that much power out of _recalibrating_."

"You do if you're also going to—"

"Oh! You mean the—"

"With the bridge connections and—"

"Yes! That'll work!" Hunk nods eagerly and Pidge cracks first all ten fingers and then her neck as she rolls it back and forth. Then they high five and go running off toward the bridge. Distantly, from down one of the Castle's long hallways, leaving the rest of them with no idea what they're talking about.

"Hey!" Keith calls after them. "Lions first!"

They change course with only the slightest hint of embarrassment (Hunk's rubbing the back of his neck and sort of chuckling to himself) and Lance and Allura follow the two of them out.

"What the—what the _quiznack_ is going on here?"

And Lance turns around and suddenly remembers Coran. "Allura," he says quietly, while the older Alean twitches slightly. "We're pretty sure… no one remembers but us, just the paladins and the lions."

"So you mean… Coran won't…?"

Lance shakes his head no.

"Oh," Allura says. "Oh no."

"Allura?" Coran says. "What is going on here?"

Allura takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and turns to look at him. She smiles, only a little bit sadly. "These are… _we_ are the paladins of Volron," she tells Coran. "This is Lance, and Keith." She gestures to the two still standing there.

"Hi," Keith says. Lance gives him two thumbs up.

"They pilot the Red and Black Lions," Allura says. "I pilot the Blue Lion, and the two others that you saw are Hunk and Pidge. They pilot the Yellow and Green Lions."

"But…"

"It's been over ten thousand years since we went into the pods, Coran," Allura says. "And…" She looks at Lance. "Apparently there's been some time travel as well."

"Ten thousand years," Coran says. He looks tired and sad, and so of course Allura runs to him, gives him a quick hug that seems to cheer him up a little.

"I know," she says. "It's a _long_ time. But you'll see. There is still a _lot_ of good in the universe—starting with the paladins."

Lance tries to look like he's trying to be modest.

"Alright, Princess," Coran says. "We'll see, won't we?" And as Lance heads out with Allura to catch up with Hunk and Pidge, he already thinks Coran looks a little bit more okay with all this.

Which is cool. They're going to need Coran—they're going to need _everyone_ on board if they want a real chance of being able to save Earth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I decided to split the ending into two chapters, this one and the next one, but that'll definitely be it. :) Thank you for your patience as I rewrote this a couple of times.


	8. Chapter 8

After a few hours of rest and some of the rations Sam had found stowed in the back of the shuttle, everyone was starting to perk up a little bit. They'd managed to figure out the coordinates of where they were going, although that didn't help much. Shiro at least had a vague idea of the neighborhood (for lack of a better word), he knew that it was pretty desolate, out on the fringes of a system that didn't have much life in it. Perfect for a base for the Blades of Marmora, although Shiro kept that to himself.

"We're getting a message," Sam said, when they were about halfway there.

"From the—from wherever we're going?" Shiro asks. If the Blades of Marmora challenge them, there's not a whole lot he's going to be able to do about it.

"No," Sam says. "From somewhere else."

Common sense says not to answer. There's basically no one in the universe that has the technology to call them that they'll want to talk to. It's more than likely to be a galra ship, wanting to know where their shuttle is going.

"Should we answer?" Matt asks.

Shiro weighs the options. If it's the galra, answering will only bring pursuers down on them. If it's the Blades of Marmora, they might not be able to land until they can give a good explanation for their presence there. "Answer it," he says, and watches as Matt's finger hovers over the buttons, mouthing something to himself as he figures out the glaran labels. He gets it right on the first try though, and a video feed pops up on the screen.

"Keith!" Shiro says, sitting up.

"Shiro?" He looks absolutely gob smacked for a second, then smiles. "It's you."

"You called us," Shiro points out, standing up but leaning against the wall to keep his balance. It was going to take him a while to recover from what Haggar had done to him.

"I didn't know it was you though," Keith says. "We got a message from the Blades, and I was just trying to get in contact with them to see if they know where the Red Lion is."

"Ulaz sent the message out," Shiro says. "I guess he must have routed it through here, instead of broadcasting it from the galra base."

"Makes sense," Keith says, but his smile is fading. "It doesn't help us track down the Red Lion, though. I was hoping the Blades would know where the Empire is keeping it…"

"They probably do," Shiro says. "And if we're lucky, they might have some records—Keith, do the Blades keep their information on any kind of a network? Something we can get into for the information we need?"

"Bits and pieces," Keith says. "But it's all going to be secure…" He trails off as Shiro steps to one side and gestures to Sam and Matt.

"I think we can get in there," he says. "If anyone can hack into a computer system programmed in a language they barely understand, it'd be the Holts."

"Oh," Keith says. "Yea, if Pidge's family is there, you can probably get into the system."

"What are we looking for?" Matt asks.

"Any reference to a Red Lion," Shiro says, and Matt pauses with his fingers on the keyboard.

"A… lion?" he asks, like he doesn't believe he's hearing Shiro right.

"I'll explain while you work," Shiro says. "Keith, I'll call you back when I have more information."

"Got it," Keith says, and the video feed flickers out.

-//-

An hour later, Keith got a message back from Shiro and the Holts, with the location where the galra were keeping the Red Lion. By this point, Lance and Pidge had come back from getting the Green Lion, and Hunk had let them know that he and Allura were headed back too.

"Lance!" Keith shouted, and then when he didn't get an answer, he called again, "Lance, I know where the Red Lion is!"

Lance came running at that, and skidded to a stop, panting. "I'm ready," he said, and Keith knew that he was. Lance had spent two years back on Earth sneaking off to the desert, climbing into a cave, and talking to the Blue Lion even when she wouldn't let him pilot her.

"It's not far," Keith says. Thankfully—They needed all four other lions here in the Castle before he could get to the Black Lion, and after that they'd still need to reach Earth, and they had to do all that before the galra get there. Keith doesn't have any family left there, all his family is in space, but… it's still Earth.

"Then why aren't we already there?" Lance asks, walking backwards so he can continue to gesticulate dramatically as he heads out. "Come on, Keith! Let's get going!"

-//-

Judging by the massive black eye Lance is sporting when he and Keith get back, someone has punched him in the face when he went to get the Red Lion. Allura almost, almost asks about it, but he looks so happy about having his Lion again that she feels bad asking how he'd gotten hurt.

"It's been hours since we left Earth," Hunk says. "Can we get back there? We have all the Lions now, and the galra have a head start on us, and I really don't want to find out what they're going to do if they actually get to Earth, and—"

He's interrupted by the distant but unmistakable roaring of the Black Lion from somewhere below them. It echoes through the Castle's halls, then slowly, gradually fades away. It's not until the sound has completely faded away that Keith speaks.

"Yea," he says. "It's time to go back to Earth."

Allura takes two steps, heading toward her Lion, and then stops when she sees that no one else has moved. "What is it?" she asks. "I thought you wanted to get back to Earth."

"It just hit me," Lance says. "We're going back to Earth."

"You were there this morning," Allura says. "I don't understand."

"It feels different," Lance says. "It's our first time going back as Voltron."

And because everyone else is nodding, and seems to understand, Allura waits the thirty seconds or so until Keith decides to start ushering everyone toward the Lions.

They have to separate to get to the hangers, and there's that moment of quiet and solitude that always comes just before Allura gets to the Blue Lion. She pauses, as is her habit, and places one palm against the cool metal of Blue's leg—it never heats up, the way the other Lions seem to. Whenever Allura puts her hand here, it seems as cool as flowing water.

Maybe she can understand why it's so momentous for the other paladins to bring Voltron back to their home planet. There's a certain magic to it that Allura doesn't think she'll ever be able to explain, no matter how much she learns of alchemy.

"Allura? Are you ready?"

That's Pidge, voice ever so slightly tinny as it echoes through her helmet.

Allura takes a deep breath, and lets her hand slide away from her Lion. "Just getting in now," she says, and climbs inside.

-//-

"I just got off the line with my dad and Matt and Shiro," Pidge says, when they're just outside Earth's solar system. "They landed at the Blade of Marmora base, and Shiro's going to try and explain what's going on to… everyone."

"Wow," Lance says, trying to imagine how he's possibly going to make the time traveling paladins of Voltron sound realistic. "I'm glad it's him and not me."

"I think we're all glad it's not you, Lance."

"Hey! Pidge!"

The laughter through his comms is familiar and more teasing than mocking, so Lance laughs right along with them. Getting back in their Lions, flying through a wormhole and straight toward a fight, it's like it's bringing them back together the way they used to be. Lance can feel his lion almost singing to him in his head, and more distantly Blue, still connected to him even with Allura piloting her now, and more distantly the other Paladins.

There's a certain feeling that comes when they form Voltron, when five paladins connect and become one. Lance can feel that bond pulling at him now, ready to pull them together. He wonders if the others can feel it too—they've never talked about it, and Lance is sort of glad. It feels a little too… personal.

"We're getting an inbound message," Hunk says. "From… well, from the Galaxy Garrison."

"We must be close enough for them to pick up on their sensors," Pidge says. "Keith, do we answer?"

"Not now," Keith says. "Behind us—the Galra ships just caught up."

Lance spins the Red Lion around to be able to see, and nods a little. There are plenty of galra ships, but nothing they can't handle. He wraps his hands around the controls, ready to take off like a shot—but then a proximity alert goes off, and he realizes that behind them, fighter ships from Earth (a total joke compared to the galran fighters) are launching, leaving Earth's atmosphere and getting ready to join a battle that they're going to lose.

That they would lose, if they didn't have Voltron on their side.

"We can't let them into this fight," Hunk says. "Guys—"

"We know, Hunk," Keith says, but he sounds tense.

"What do we do?"

There's an ever so brief hesitation before Keith takes a breath—it sounds like a crackle of static over the comms—and says, "Form Voltron!"

Lance can't help letting out a whoop as he jams the controls upward, and his lion just responds, rocketing upward alongside the others, drawing inward, toward them. He can feel the bond between them opening up, growing, he can feel them joining.

And then he blinks, and he's still Lance, but he's a part of Voltron, too. It's a weird feeling.

It's a feeling he loves.

Around them, everyone has stopped. The galra troops, who know what it means to have Voltron form in front of them, seem frozen in place—Lance is kind of sad he can't see the looks on any of their faces. On the other side, the ships from Earth are sort of darting back and forth, clearly confused by what the heck is even happening.

Voltron turns its back on the galran ships, a move that makes Lance laugh just because of the sheer bravado—one of the galran ships takes a pot shot but it's weak and bounces off Voltron's armor with a slight ping sound. No one dares to attack after that.

"Pidge," Keith says. "Can you open a channel broadcasting to all the ships coming up from Earth?"

"Done," she says, after just a little bit of frantic tapping from her end. "What are you going to say?"

Keith doesn't answer, not directly. Instead, he addresses the ships still coming up from Earth. They're Garrison ships, Lance can see now, and he feels tension squeezing at his insides when he thinks about how he'd been at the Garrison this morning. He might have eaten breakfast in the canteen next to one of the pilots of these ships, and he doesn't want them to be hurt.

"People of Earth," Keith says.

"Weird way to start," Lance says, just to the other Paladins. "He sounds like an alien when he talks like that."

"He is an alien," Hunk points out.

"Yea but he doesn't have to sound like a bad movie."

"Lance, Hunk, hush," Allura whispers.

"The ships you see behind us belong to the Galran Empire," Keith goes on. "For ten thousand years, they have ruled the universe with an iron fist, led by their Emperor, Zarkon. Now they've come for Earth."

He lets that sink in for a minute, silence surrounding them. Then Keith goes on again.

"We are Voltron," he says, in a voice that is strong, and certain. "We are here to fight for you, and we are going to defend you from the Empire, and anyone else that comes to threaten you."

There's a long pause, stretching out just long enough to be awkward, and then Keith ends on, "So… we're going to do that now."

Pidge, unprompted, cuts off the broadcast before Keith can say anything else. "Should we go make sure no one ever thinks it's a good idea to mess with Earth ever again?"

"Yea," Keith says, and Voltron turns around to face the galra ships. "Sounds like a great idea."

And they fly forward to fight the Galran ships, with Earth at their back and behind their shield. And they fight, to (finally) defend their home. From Haggar. From the Galra Empire. Just like they'll fight to defend the rest of the universe--and there is still a  _lot_ of defending left to do. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are at the end! Thank you to anyone that stuck with this, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!


End file.
